Dick Huey has successfully consulted a host of top independent record labels, publishers, sport, and tech firms in his 30 year music career, operating under the Toolshed consultancy banner.
Music, tech, and sports brands looking for guidance or assistance in the complex rights, licensing, and business development world of digital music have turned to Toolshed for measurable and effective results, time and time again. We work closely with a variety of influential and connected music industry attorneys for our digital business work, and can make recommendations as needed or comfortably slot in with your existing legal resource.
Toolshed is one of the longest running digital consultancies worldwide. Our partial client list above speaks for itself. We offer two types of relationships: Advisory/Board, and Consultancy.
Advisory / Board relationships:
- Toolshed has successfully provided advisory services to new and exploratory music tech companies in headline digital music verticals before those verticals were a “thing” – social media (2007), digital marketing and digital retail (2002), and now digital community/Web3 (2021).
Past/current client business development work: OkTY, Paperchain, Future of Music Coalition, Jaxsta, 8Tracks, SoundExchange, Tunecore, Digital Rights Agency, RoyaltyShare
Consultancy Relationships – three verticals of service:
- Business development consultancy services
Established music tech firms producing B2B and B2C products with market fit and revenue generation. Specialty areas include Fintech (financial technology), AI, edtech, music synchronization, and sales analysis tools. Dick Huey is a highly connected and directly engaged business development consultant who will promote and sell/license your product into the music industry. Engagements are generally long-term, and involve a substantial investment of time and energy on my part to become deeply familiar with your product and market.Past/current client business development work: AIMS API, Entertainment Intelligence, Paperchain, Jaxsta, Consolidated Independent
- Music license acquisition for music tech firms
Direct expertise in license acquisition of statutory and interactive music licenses from sound recording owners (labels), composition owners (publishers), and collectives (Merlin, performing rights organizations). This is a highly relationship-driven exercise in the music industry, and it’s easy to approach it incorrectly and create a reputational mistake that’s difficult to recover from. Toolshed has delivered measurable, concrete success for its client base of carefully curated tech, sports, and lifestyle companies.Past/current client work: Spotify, 8Tracks, Red Bull Music Radio, HijackRadio, Jaxsta
- Strategic consultancy / catalog licensing for sound recording owners
Corporate design and implementation of new business initiatives. In 2022, Toolshed was hired to work with a C-Level team of a large music publisher to evaluate a catalog, perform a SWOT and financial analysis, ideate and implement the build of an independent label / aggregator, and re-allocate personnel.We also worked with a leading edtech startup (Scott Galloway’s Section4) as a multi-year senior teaching assistant, across a variety of educational verticals including Product, Brand, Growth Innovation, Storytelling, Data Analytics, Subscription strategy, and Productivity.
Toolshed has a 25 year history as a negotiator of digital licenses with essentially every major and mid-sized DMS on behalf of some of the smallest and some of the largest sound recording owners (record labels, artists).
Past/current client work: Merge Records, Beggars Group, OCP, Section4, Touch and Go Records, PIAS, spinART, Righteous Babe Records, Saddle Creek Records, many others.